I don't want or own a car though I've driven for years, even made my living as a driver. I don't want to live anywhere where I need a car. And of course cars are an environmental disaster. For our species they've been suicidal.

As a kid I enjoyed taking a bus downtown and wandering the lonely stone monuments along the Scioto River; I did the same thing on dates when I got older. I haunted the derelict movie palaces, a favorite used bookstore, an old cafeteria, a magic shop, a model train store. Columbus had given up hope on its downtown like most other American cities in the 1960s.

New York City has always felt like a big downtown to me. Things I like come and go, but there's always something going on, some new place or old place to check out. I do all of it without a car. I don't even take an Uber or yellow cab that often, usually the train or the bus. I take mass transit to work and to go to the movies.

Meeting Europe's mass transit was a real pleasure, especially in the Netherlands.

Cimetière du Père-Lachaise. We visited the grave of Proust, of Oscar Wilde, and the mess around the defaced bust and grave of Jim Morrison. Thanks, hippies.

The premiere of the Katz-Harris resoration of Vertigo happened at the Ziegfeld Theatre, the last single-screen movie palace in NYC that was still showing movies. I walked in behind Kim Novak and Pat Hitchcock, and sat three rows behind them; as I walked out I discussed the score with Thurston Moore. (He did not know that MX80 Sound had covered Herrmann's theme from Sisters.) It was the single best film experience of my life.

It opened in 1969 and closed in 2016; New York has nothing like it as of this writing (2024). Manhattan had a dozen huge theaters when I arrived in ’79; only Radio City and the United Palace remain, and neither shows films on a regular basis. Perhaps there are still one or two I don’t know about? I’d like to think so. The Zeigfeld is now a ballroom for rich people.